


Lampshades on Fire

by LightDescending, stellarators (starfoozle)



Category: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
Genre: Backstory, For Science!, Gen, Origin Story, Villains
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-03
Updated: 2019-11-03
Packaged: 2021-01-20 23:13:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,739
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21289748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LightDescending/pseuds/LightDescending, https://archiveofourown.org/users/starfoozle/pseuds/stellarators
Summary: Or, How Dr. Olivia Octavius Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Morally Unambiguous Nature of her Violent Actions.A review of the scientist-to-supervillian pipeline, based on a longitudinal case study.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 38





	Lampshades on Fire

**Abstract**

A review of the scientist-to-supervillian pipeline, based on a longitudinal case study.

* * *

**I. Introduction**

You’d always wanted to save the world.

Yeah, yeah, you and every other scientist and engineer and researcher worth their weight in carbon. Your story’s common as dirt in your field -- some bright young thing born into a world that was already too hot, too crowded, beginning to choke on its own fumes in quantifiable ways from the time you were a kid, and _that_ was half a century ago. Nobody ever tells you that going into the sciences means you get a front-row seat to the death of the planet. It’s enough to drive anyone mad.

You’re _not_, though. Not mad, insane, or bat-shit crazy, not whatever moniker people like to attach to people struggling with a neurochemical imbalance and people whose politics or proposals they disagree with, as though the two categories are interchangeable and worth being dismissed on principle. That it’s impossible to look at the state of the world without inducing some kind of despair-catalyzed mental health crisis these days is beside the point. You are an entirely rational actor, and you intend to use that rationality to come up with any solution to this planetary-scale mess that you can.

You _are_ mad as in _angry_, however.

Conveniently, anger is a renewable resource. You’ve had a lifetime to build up a reserve, and honestly? It’s about time you put it to use.

**II. Literature Review**

After years of extensive review, you wake up one morning, make yourself a cup of tea, and blearily determine that the world’s probably beyond saving through conventional methods.

It’s all about energy balance, you think, watching the steam rise from your mug. You’ve looked at damn near every existing technology to try and determine what’s viable: cold fusion stalled in the 80s and took your original plans for your PhD along with it, traditional fission leaves radioactive remnants that will poison the earth for millenia, fossil fuels a climate time bomb and none of the carbon-capturing technologies break even on an energy input-output level. Capacitor technology is improving, as are hydrogen cells, but both require rare earth metals that can’t just be synthesized in a lab and instead have to be dug up as conflict minerals, and nobody will fund _any_ novel strategies sufficiently. Not to mention the lack of political will to pull off any kind of energy transition before the entire planet cooks itself to death.

It’s been over a decade of studying this particular problem, first as a tenure-track instructor, then a research fellow in Switzerland at CERN, then a private contractor, and most recently the new head of Alchemax after the old CEO, one of your former mentors, got to retirement age. He’d always liked your theoretical work with dark matter, and while you tend to steer the company in the direction of practical applications for beamline technology, it had been nice to have someone else around who humored your interest in purely experimental work -- the kind you can rarely afford to indulge in in a leadership role these days. You’re in your mid-40s at this point and well aware that a mid-life crisis is probably just around the corner -- a concept you’ve always scoffed at, although now you’re starting to suspect that a lot of said crises are fueled by a sense of thwarted potential. Or, alternatively, sheer panic at all the things you never managed to solve, but always borne the societal weight of feeling _responsible _for.

What’s needed is a creative solution, but you’re angry enough to want to punch a hole through the fabric of reality itself every time you turn on the news these days.

Most days you’ve had to settle for pedaling your bike fast and hard enough through the streets of New York that your route could be traced by the cacophony of angry car horns blaring in your wake, but you need to burn off that pent-up energy _somehow_ so you can think more clearly when you finally arrive at the lab. Turns out cardio is great for that.

On one of those early morning commutes traffic’s even more backed up than usual -- slowed to a crawl in your direction of travel, and completely stopped in the other lane. You pedal up the shoulder, morbidly curious as to what caused the slowdown, and the answer becomes obvious half a mile up the road as the wail of sirens grows louder. A flatbed truck carrying a load of pipes has t-boned a tanker truck at the intersection, and the force of the collision has sent several of the metal tubes straight through the storage tank of the other vehicle. You can smell the reek of fuel oil from here. Emergency responders are furiously pouring sand on the gallons of liquid pouring from the ends of the pipes and redirecting vehicles, and you veer off on the closest side street as soon as you find an opening in traffic that’ll let you though. You don’t hear any explosions behind you for the rest of your commute, at least, and there’s no fatalities reported later on the news, but it’s still an unpleasant start to the morning. All that energy wasted, pouring down the storm drains to choke the river. You would have thought tanker trucks were more strongly reinforced, but the pipes looked like they’d punched through the metal tank like a rail gun, protruding from the other side as fuel poured from the entry and exit wounds.

There’s a metaphor in there somewhere, you think. Something about collisions and energy and structural failure, and something about the inevitability of accidents and collateral damage and the entangled nature of systems nobody is able to escape. And you’re angry all over again, angry at the traffic and the accident and the whole damn wasteful world, and the metaphor compresses and narrows and condenses on itself like a dying star until it’s not a metaphor any longer.

It’s an _idea_.

\--

You try to snap out of it. You do. You respond to emails, work on your latest proposal draft, text a few grad school buddies to ask if they want to grab drinks after work, since you’ll be booked solid with board meetings at the Hudson Valley lab for the rest of the week. You hope a little social time will clear your head, but it’s hit or miss whether talking to your friends will actually be helpful, because the same issues are eating them alive, too.

Inevitably, the subject rises to the surface despite your best efforts at happy hour, once the whole lot of you are a couple of beers in. Despairing about the headlines over drinks is an occupational hazard the moment you get more than one career researcher in a room, and it’s inevitable that the conversation turns from the accident this morning to the wildfires and hurricanes and dozens of hundred-year storms happening back-to-back for the last five summers. Today’s been eating at everyone, apparently, because your quips about the front-page spiral into a broader discussion about climate crisis and fossil fuel divestment and infrastructure replacement and _futility_, and that’s not the note you want to end the night on at all.

So you bring up the idea that’s been haunting you all day. The idea for a pipe-dream experiment on whether you _could_ harness energy from somewhere else entirely. A wormhole, theoretically. Call it a thought exercise for the table. What if it could solve the energy problem once and for all? Would breaking the rules of reality like that be worth the risk?

They bite, and you theorize half-assedly over your next round of drinks. Jim reckons that any breakthrough would be a good breakthrough at this point: once an avid Y2K-er, he’s come around to the sobering concept that maybe there is no imminent societal collapse, and a slow, painful decline is going to be even uglier. He’s into your concept with an intensity that you find deeply bolstering. Chaya isn’t as impressed, but does invite you to come to her krav maga class sometime to blow off some of the frustrations you obviously need to vent. (You may have to take her up on that.) May’s intrigued, and also significantly less doom-and-gloom than the rest of you at this moment -- she tells you about the things she’s doing in a federal lab alongside a whole bunch of other scientists, everyone from nuclear wonks (that’s promising) to physicists to chemical engineers (her nephew wants to be one, wouldn’t you know it), and maybe you should send a couple emails out her way.

You set a date with May to get coffee and talk things over some more, maybe go to one of the social mixers at May’s lab sometime.

On the walk back to the subway, both a little tipsy, though at least half the flush is from good company and the rush of the conversation, May asks you scientist-to-scientist whether you actually think it’s possible, what you were talking about.

If you’re being honest, you’ve got serious misgivings. The Compact Muon Solenoid is finally operational and is one of the most exciting pieces of equipment you’ve heard of related to your particular research interests; even so, it could take years to prove substantively that alternate dimensions exist, let alone in a stable enough configuration adjacent to _this _universe to be accessible.

And in the meantime, there’s so much work to do on the ground here -- there’s the contract to finish for an interesting wearable soft-body robotics project that’s receiving partial federal funding. Assuming yours is the design that gets picked from all the total bidders, your lab is in the running to receive a substantial public investment and it’s demanding almost all of your full attention. This is just a tiny idea that you’ve had, even if it’s the closest thing to a religious epiphany you’ve felt since staring at the actual ATLAS detector in-person. You’re not even sure how you’d write a grant to support the work that needs doing, even if you’re able to funnel some discretionary funds and hire some grad students to help with initial literature reviews. It probably is a pipe dream, and on top of that, it’s more than a little absurd.

So ultimately, you tell May, _no_, you’re not convinced that it’s possible to shift the massive inert bulk of society towards exploration of the multiverse. And the kinds of ideas you’ve got right now are likely too risky to be supported by even the most avantgarde institutions.

What you don’t tell her is that you’re pretty sure it _could_ happen with sufficient R&D.

**III. Methods**

Funding always presents challenges to the pursuit of cutting-edge science.

DOD and DOE won’t bite on the wearable robotics project, so you re-appropriate the suit prototype you’ve been working on after the design gets passed over for another lab’s significantly less-stylish work. You’re not entirely sure what it’ll be useful for, yet, but you’ll be damned if they take a fully functional asset away from you, much less one that’s now attuned to your neural system. The feds are also categorically uninterested in wingnut theories about other dimensions, even if the preliminary math has checked out so far, and the stranger your background research gets the less you suspect you’ll be able to find an appropriate grant to apply for, no matter how convincing your pitch about novel energy sources might be. Partnering directly with a university means a nightmarish amount of paperwork and there’ll be too many conflicts of interest if you try to collaborate with IBM or another major company, so the regrettable but obvious solution is to keep the project strictly internal. Alchemax-only. At least for now.

You talk to accounting, run some numbers, put out a call for research fellows and start strategically hiring graduate students, post-docs, and other researchers from around the globe. You talk at length with HR to ensure that potential candidates are a good fit for your organizational culture, which means choosing the ones who are either completely unflappable or a little _too_ excited about cutting-edge science and willing to put up with non-disclosure agreements.

You know you need to operate small-scale, but you can’t do good science in a vacuum. So you network, filling your calendar with conferences dotting the globe and trying not to wince at the growing carbon footprint from all those plane tickets. You get drinks at symposia and panel meetings with old Caltech and CERN compatriots and brainstorm, grill them about risks, take detailed notes, and most importantly, swap files.

You’re well-respected in your field and a CEO to boot, but even with similar clout to most middling-tier academic institutions, you can’t ensure you’ll have access to unpublished or private papers and datasets at the point-of-need. Some of your old colleagues and new contacts sound intrigued by your so-far mysterious project, but so many of them are bound by their own academic or corporate privacy policies and NDAs. But there’s an easy workaround to that. If you can’t _find_ what you need open-source, you can _make_ it open-source.

When you look back on it, maybe keeping the soft robotics suit for yourself was the start of a long string of bad habits. On the other hand, they _are _incredibly liberatory bad habits. Copyright laws are bullshit in the US, which is a truth almost universally acknowledged even among those who have the most to gain from publication practices -- no one’s figured out how to solve the incentive problem as far as research goes.

But if you’re on good terms with all your old professors, with every network you’ve established along the way of your long and so-far-brilliant career, then what’s a little file-sharing between friends? Pair that with the shoddy computer-security practices of most harried academics and perhaps a little malware, and you’ve got yourself a steady, reliable stream of new information. It’s not hurting anyone except the publishers, and the quantity and quality of cutting-edge research pouring in is almost addictive. R&D at Alchemax surges forward exponentially, especially since you can actually afford to pay for employees instead of journal subscriptions now. Paywalls can _suck it_.

The next issue to deal with is how to manage your new social connections, but then you remember the swag bag from every conference you attended as a grad student and the epiphany strikes. That’s how you become a spear-phisher -- you get into local computers by stocking little Alchemax-branded flash drives at your booth at conferences and tabling events, each one containing another tiny dark web program that gives you full access to the Z: drive or the W: drive or the entire set of servers when your new contact plugs it in. Back doors into infinity.

A few weeks in, your engineering team gets stuck on an ignition source issue that no amount of asking around and digging through purloined articles can resolve. You grit your teeth and splurge on someone off the dark web who writes you some code that can get into the CERN network and scrape information off their servers, and that’s _definitely_ crossing a line but you get exactly what you need and don’t look back. The same code works at the Canadian Light Source, Fermilab, Brookhaven, even the National Ignition Facility.

Now you’re cooking with fire.

Granted, it is a bit of a mood-killer when May eventually finds out that your extended conversations with her carried the motive of capitalizing on her connections to people in high places; she doesn’t like that, not at all. That stings, being accused of “using her” -- what’s wrong with making the most of the connections you know other people have? It’s called _networking_, and considering May has spent as much time in academia as you have, you think she would have figured out by now that this is what that means.

Okay, so maybe May is less upset about that than she is about the fact that you accidentally name-dropped a project that’s still classified and not even _submitted _anywhere yet when you go out for drinks again one-on-one. May connected the dots instantly because of _course_ she did, and wanted to know where the hell you got access to that information considering the clearance that everyone else on the project had to get, and it all goes to shit from there. Who knew May was such a champion of scholarly communications? Jeez.

But May takes it personally, and tells you to lose her number until you learn to acknowledge “how inappropriate this all was”. So that’s a potential relationship in the scrap heap, and with the only person you actually thought might be an even match for you. And then her nephew quits your lab, which adds professional insult to personal injury.

It’s not _stealing_. You just need to build your own supercollider and to do _that_ you need to get some idea of the latest cutting-edge tech, but who has time to wait until the information you need gets through the publication cycle? Institutional repositories of pre-prints can only take a woman so far before you need the genuine article. With the thousands of dollars you’ve been saving on this front, being able to bypass access restrictions, you’ve been able to start getting raw materials and hire more engineers on the sly to start drafting your own plans. That’s not a crime, that’s _optimization_.

So you get over it. Totally. And you learn to cover your tracks more thoroughly, and be more careful about who you get martinis with.

\--

Doesn’t fix the money problem, of course. A year or so goes by, this whole scheme already more of a DIY than you’d like to admit, and all you have to show for it so far is a bunch of blueprints, overeager new hires, and more knowledge of cybersecurity exploits than you care to possess. You’re a physicist and polymath, not an accountant. Your house of cards looks like it’s teetering and for weeks now you’ve been waking in the night from dreams of other universes where you _haven’t_ run a multi-million dollar research corporation into the ground in pursuit of a crackpot theory you might not even have enough money left to ever test. So much for saving the world -- you might not even be able to save your own company, at this rate.

In your desperation, you resort to other measures to get the job done. You see, providers of nuclear-themed accoutrements and reactor supplies are generally unwilling to sell to someone without capital -- they don’t exactly take IOU’s on invoices worth millions of dollars for dangerous tracked substances and components. And you just so happen to have a super-suit lying around, of sorts, and enough encyclopedic knowledge of security systems to know how to disable a few key parts of some.

The suit is tuned to your biometrics, given that you designed and tested the thing, and it’s not like you trust anyone else to handle high-level radioactive material without causing some sort of orphan-source incident. You’ve gotten pretty good at using the suit during construction and taking it for a test-drive outside the lab wouldn’t be too far a stretch once you add in those martial arts classes you actually did end up taking with Chaya.

Your core group of employees gets briefed on the plan, and one of the post-docs suggests that if you have a super-suit, you’re probably going to need an alter-ego. They already affectionately call you Doc Ock, so that’ll work for now until you figure out something more clever. Either that, or you’ll lean into the cephalopod aesthetic.

The first few expeditions -- yep, you’re officially stealing now -- go well! There are some toasts around the lab with each success, for one because everyone thinks you’re kind of a badass, but also because the continued assurance of job security is genuinely something to celebrate. There are a few dramatic readings of news stories, and everyone howls at the speculation that you might be some new “super-villain” here to terrorize the city. Please. What’s a little irradiated material among professionals?

But you slip on a security sub-routine a couple rounds later that must have sent out a silent alarm. Or maybe the warehouse anticipated that you’d come back and got the local vigilante webslinger involved -- it felt like he was waiting for you. The problem is that even with inventory lists and plans down-to-the-millisecond, there’s always room for human error. That’s a lot harder to calculate for.

Shit gets a lot harder after that, and sometimes you end up back at the lab with the wrong fucking part -- “whatever you could grab in the moment” is a terrible modus operandi. And even with your reactor slowly coming together, cobbled together from stolen bits and bobs along with what you _legally_ acquire, it’s still not enough. Now you have to contend with Spider-Man on top of everything else, and Alchemax’s budget continues steadily pushing into the red.

\--

...Funny enough, it’s another car crash that solves this problem too.

A tragic accident befalls a very wealthy local figure. This local figure’s employees, desperate to avoid his rage and grief over the death of his wife and son, go searching for solutions. One of those employees likes to watch science documentaries to unwind from his particular line of work and happened to come across a clip of you discussing multiverse theory in an interview you did for a K-12 educational video. The employee sends you an email, because even though intimidation is in his job description, he figures showing up with a bunch of armed colleagues in a long black car is probably not the best way to get a researcher’s attention if a conference room can just be booked instead.

You honestly hadn’t expected your career to take _this_ kind of turn.

A meeting is arranged. Cautious introductions are made. High-level theoretical concepts are broken down into plain language, and you find yourself grateful that you’ve done plenty of workshops on how to talk about science with children, because the calming tones and simple illustrations in your presentation also seem to be working well for a heartbroken but still terrifying Wilson Fisk. Who, for the record, seems to know about your alter-ego. Just in case you needed more incentive to sign up with him.

Checks are written.

No going back on this one, now.

(The “bringing people back from another universe” thing is unlikely to work out. You harbor a deep suspicion that the universe will course-correct itself even if you try. To be honest, you don’t even think there’s a safe way to travel interdimensionally -- but since you need a cover story, that one’s as good as any. _And _there’s a way to spin it if you end up pitching early results to potential private investors beyond Fisk. Maybe shift from career criminals to legitimate funding sources after all, though you think, somewhat bitterly, that this is your existential dues for all that property theft after all.)

(In the end, it’s all about energy. _Truly _clean energy, which breaks all laws of physics -- in this reality, there’s always a price to pay, an equal and opposite reaction, and plenty of byproducts. But if your math is right, breaking physics itself might be the way around those rules.)

You can’t put that in a grant proposal to a grieving mob boss, though, so resurrecting the dead it is.

**IV. Results**

It works.

_It actually works_.

It is, however, not quite in the way you were expecting.

Experimentation starts much earlier in the project than you’d intended, when a piece of ceiling tile gets knocked loose by the vibration of the collider starting up and tumbling into the path of the beam during an early test. There’s a sudden flash, strange fractal-like patterns dance across your vision for a split second, and you have a moment of genuine concern over whether you’ve just triggered a reaction that’s going to kill everyone standing in front of the observation window -- until the ceiling tile falls through the other side of the beam, apparently unharmed. You activate the emergency shutdown and send techs out to collect the tile for analysis once the system has cooled.

They don’t bring back one tile. They bring back four. All resemble the original superficially, but are slightly different shades of gray, and one appears to be made of solid asbestos rather than the usual lead shielding.

_Weird_.

More tests follow, but if there’s a precise logic to what gets pulled through from Elsewhere, you haven’t been able to follow it. A square of aluminum foil inserted into the beamline produces four outputs: an exact duplicate, another exact duplicate coated in a layer of jet-black ash, a wadded-up ball of aluminum foil, and a sharp-edged chunk of metal that flies out of the beam and ricochets off the reinforced glass in front of you hard enough to leave a chip before falling to the chamber floor, smoking.

You do just enough tests to verify some seriously weird shit is bouncing back out of the collider, but that whatever you put in summons something that is at least a free-association related to the original input. Metal begets metal, paper begets paper, plants beget plants -- mostly. You have to move fast to placate your funder for now, can’t afford to do research in its purest form when you’re supposedly retrieving someone’s family. You really want to drop a hydrogen fuel cell into the beamline already to see what the multiverse spits back at you as a solution that other worlds have developed, but Fisk makes it clear that the next test will be live subjects or bust. To placate the more conscientious among your employees on the project, you settle on using a spider, since you’ve got plenty of large, docile orb weavers around the property, given the time of year -- invertebrates aren’t protected under IRB protocols, and that seems to make the postdocs more comfortable.

The spider test is dubious at best. The specimens that you manage to catch get placed in your office overnight for observation, and you mean to analyze them the next day, but security footage shows them fizzle spectacularly in a kaleidoscopic clusterfuck of decaying particulate matter that doesn’t maintain enough structure to put under the highest-power microscope you have._ Fuck. _The collider doesn’t seem to like bringing living things across, and neither does the fabric of reality -- there has been a little disturbing seismology since you switched from inorganic to organic to tests involving living material. By which you mean material that was currently alive and...maybe wouldn’t be for much longer.

Nothing sticks. Everything breaks down.

Not ideal.

Luckily, you’re a seasoned professional when it comes to sharing information with an asterisk attached. Fisk? He might be an expert in the art of selective hearing, though you think that might be giving him a bit too much credit. Your technobabble seems to soothe him, even when the lengthy briefings you give him contain contradictory findings or statements that would raise alarms for almost anyone else, frankly, as long as they had a decent enough level of reading comprehension. There’s enough dumb hope in the guy that it almost makes you feel sorry for him, knowing how this will turn out for Vanessa and Richard if they ever do make it to this side of the rift.

In the aftermath of another test, you see a lamp-post merged with fifty artifacts of alternate dimensions and your heart quickens. Any time there’s decay, that’s an expenditure of energy -- energy you can harness, still, if you work on your alibi.

Reality might be coming apart at the seams, but sometimes that’s how you reach a breakthrough.

**V. Discussion**

Sure, there’ve been some methodological challenges: fucking Spider-Man, _every time_. _Every _time. The closer you get to Fisk’s arbitrary deadline, the more frequently Doc Ock has to surface on last minute supply runs, and you all-too-often get your ass handed to you by the webslinger. Still, for the most part he’s just another variable to account for. An irritant, but not someone you feel compelled to actively engage with -- merely to deter. At least your employees get the opportunity for some professional development, even if “combat skills with plasma weaponry” is a strange line to add to a CV.

But if you can rationalize the situation -- and of course you can, because you always can -- then Fisk’s ruthless approach to Spider-Man’s interference is further evidence in an ever-expanding pile of why he’s impossible to work with. Of course he takes it personally, over-reacts; he’s never heard of subtlety or a proportional response in his life.

You find out that Spider-Man’s last words were asking Fisk whether he wanted to know what he’d seen, and you could strangle Fisk yourself for killing him right then and there instead of _finding out. _Where are you going to find another eye-witness to the inside structure of space-time?

\--

Then again, sometimes you get an opportunity to try again, even if you weren’t expecting it.

You meet a different Peter, a sloppier one, with that stupid “act-natural” pose that he puts on like it’s charming with _every _civilian; he has none of the self-aware irony that you’ve come to expect from Spider-Man - he’s wearing sweatpants, for God’s sake. Almost immediately after, you confirm that he’s got no idea who you are.

You’ve _dealt_ with this already! It _had_ been a relief to think you could progress unencumbered from here out, barring Fisk’s buffoonery. You’ve also processed that _this _is why things were doomed to fail with May, on top of whatever moralizing she was on about. Because her nephew was the fucking Spider-Man, and she never bothered to tell you. You had to find out from the news like everybody else. Because he died.

The optics are _really_ bad. And now he’s _back_.

Your cataclysmic rage is tempered marginally by what occurs to you in the time it takes you to blurt that _he’s supposed to be dead_.

This is good, actually, this is very good. He’s going to facilitate observation in real-time of the effects of cellular decay _and _now you can interrogate what the experience of being pulled through the portals is like. Bonus: watching him disintegrate is going to be really cathartic. The second he opens his mouth he confirms what a bootleg, knock-off, sub-par copy he is. He’s obviously washed up, so it’s probably no great loss to the multiverse -- he’ll get a chance to be useful in his final days, serve a purpose greater than whatever in his sad life put him in this state. Right? No problem. And then May never has to know.

Except he gets away, and then he’s just a liability, along with the hard drive he stole.

Methodological challenges.

On the upshot of things -- Spider-Man turned out not to be invincible once, so he won’t be again.

\--

If you can’t get the USB drive back from the Spider-People before you boot everything up (fool me once, shame on you--) you’ll just hurl them into the middle of the reaction and accept that you’ll never find out what happens to them. That’s not how you would prefer to deal with the problem, but they’ve pretty much left you no choice at this point. This is your _entire life’s work _that you’re talking about here, not to mention the best chance the planet has of averting a mass extinction event. Rebuilding the damn collider took nearly all of your workforce’s combined efforts in a blitz of activity that would put Caltech’s final exam week to shame. You nearly started playing Ride of the Valkyries as an accompaniment before thinking better of it -- no one would have gotten the joke. No more explosions or setbacks. No more Spider-Man.

Thinking more positively, more future-oriented: once the bugs are worked out, who knows? If Fisk’s delusional faith that people can travel across dimensions in one piece pans out, it might be worth checking out some real estate on the other side. (This one’s done, so where to now? Anywhere that opens up.)

So when Fisk asks you why he’s suddenly got three problems on his hands, this is how you sum up your approach:

“_It means you get what you want. It means my collider works. All we have to do is kill a couple of spiders... and the collider will bring your family back. As many families as you want_.”

That last part is categorically untrue, of course. But it’s what he needs to hear.

**VI. Conclusion**

When this drops, the consequences will be astronomical. This will rewrite massive swaths of the standard model. Dimensional rift-based power plants, _imagine_. Strange side effects will probably be worth it to get to divest from fossil fuels, and who knows what R&D will yield in terms of thermal regulation, carbon capture, clean water production -- you’re still gonna save the world, even if the collateral damage is more than most people can stomach.

“Good” and “bad” are beside the point. There is no protocol for situations like this -- what the collider spits out is just a byproduct of the research, if one that happens to be alive and occasionally sentient. And who says that beings from an alternate dimension are more important than the billions of lives already established in this one? If a couple Spider-People die along the way in the next few critical days, they shouldn’t have been in this universe to begin with. Blame that imbecile Green Goblin if you have to: _he’s_ the one, _not you_, who shoved Spidey’s face into the beam.

If Fisk’s family actually _can_ get through in this second full run of the experiment, it’ll mean the portal can remain open and stable enough to sustain data-collection about ongoing processes _as they are occurring_. It means you can begin running the subroutines related to energy extraction and storage, and you’ll have a nearly unlimited supply of tester material deposited around New York, ripe and ready for the picking, even if it looks like a Cubist’s worst nightmare.

You’re not the good guy anymore -- maybe never have been. But at this point, who gives a shit?

“Villain” is so passe. “Pragmatist” is infinitely preferable.

Nothing personal. It’s just science.

**Author's Note:**

> A gay-married environmental scientist and a librarian walk into a Google Doc and decide they're going to write some Olivia Octavius backstory together... 
> 
> Tonally, this is super different from the _other_ backstory that LightDescending is writing. It is, however, tonally in line with our mutual feelings on the academic publication process, our intense armchair interest in particle physics, and ongoing distress about global climate change. 
> 
> Also, Doc Ock hot. It's a problem.
> 
> (with apologies to Modest Mouse)


End file.
